How Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. election and became the president-elect.
2024 election polls told us the election was “essentially tied.” However, Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. He didn’t win in a landslide, but he won significantly. In this episode, Beyond Today’s Headlines host Brad LaPlante is joined by the Wall Street Journal’s Dante Chinni to dive into why so many turned out to vote for Donald Trump, what this means for the country and where Democrats go from here.
Reporter: We are now projecting that the next president of the United States is... Donald Trump.
Brad LaPlante: Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, and for many Americans, this result feels different. Unlike 2016, Trump won this election by winning the popular vote, making considerable gains in critical Democratic counties, and ultimately winning every swing state by a healthy margin. Trump won in counties with large hispanic populations, areas with many Black voters and crucially won Dearborn, Michigan - home to the largest Arab-American population in the country. Welcome to Beyond Today's Headlines. I'm Brad LaPlante. My guest today is Dante Chinni, a political reporter at the Wall Street Journal and director at the American Communities Project. The project aims to use election results, economic numbers and polling to break communities into different segments for analysis. Here is Dante Chinni.
LaPlante: Dante, I don't know if you know this, but the U.S. just had an election.
Dante Chinni: I've heard about that. It's been in the papers.
LaPlante: What was your reaction to the election and was the outcome what you expected?
Chinni: I wouldn't say it was or wasn't what I expected. I didn't know what to expect. It's the first time in a long time that I've gone into an election completely unclear of what's going to happen. I talked to a bunch of people before and said no outcome would surprise me. There was just no way of knowing. The polls predicted a margin-of-error election and it was a close race. I wasn't super surprised, but I didn't go in knowing what to expect.
LaPlante: In 2016, we saw Trump win the election, but the popular vote went to Hillary Clinton. This time, it was much more decisive for him. What do you think changed?
Chinni: It really feels like it was the economy. I don't think people understand this, but Trump got 47% of the vote in 2016, he got about 48% in 2020. He's going to get a little over 50 in this election. Trump is always going to get his 47-48% and there will always be a lot of theories. A lot of people were really focused on the economy, rightly or wrongly.
LaPlante: The economy was the top issue for voters, but I am fascinated by the disconnect between Trump's campaign promises and what people want.
Chinni: Where's the substance? The substance is all over the internet. Is he really going to deport people? Yeah, he really said he was gonna do that. He didn't have to say what he's going to do about the economy because a lot of people thought the economy was better under Donald Trump, and using many different data points, it's not true. What happened was the Biden administration was dealing with inflation. Inflation is the hardest issue to run against.
